Stalin: A Biography

expanded. By 1931 it had 1,369,406 full members.¹⁶ Literacy and numeracy spread. There was a reprise of revolutionary spirit as the regime gave out the message that socialism was being created in the USSR while abroad capitalism was entering its final crisis. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 made this a plausible message at the time. Unconditional enthusiasts for the Politburo’s policies existed everywhere. Even many who detested the violence and vilification were willing to believe that a new and better world was being created. In the party there was relief that action at last was being taken. Bukharin’s group had so little organised support that it did not merit the name of the Right Opposition. The end of the NEP was welcomed. Local party secretaries became mini-Stalins making all the fundamental decisions across the range of public policy — and the fact that nearly all the economy was somehow or other taken into the hands of the state meant that their powers had never been greater.¹⁷

While promoting industrialisation and collectivisation, Stalin did not overlook the fact that he ruled a former empire. In a speech to a conference of industrial functionaries on 4 February 1931 he declared: ‘In the past we didn’t have and couldn’t have a fatherland. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, the people — and we — have a fatherland and we will protect its independence.’¹⁸ Patriotism was making its way back on to the list of official priorities. While society was being split asunder by policy initiatives from the late 1920s, Stalin recognised that some cement was needed to keep the people of the USSR together.

The range of changed policies was large, and in every case Stalin’s intervening hand was felt. Even on the ‘philosophical front’ he was active. On 9 December he visited the Institute of Red Professors. Several of the academics, including Abram Deborin, were known as supporters of Bukharin. Stalin demanded greater militancy from his own followers in the party cell at the institute: ‘Everything written here by you is correct; the problem is that not everything has yet been said. In the critical part it’s possible to say much more. You’ve given the correct evaluation here but it’s too soft and unsatisfactory.’ Then he added: ‘Do you have the forces? Will you be able to cope? If you have the forces, you need to do some beating.’¹⁹ Stalin was determined to crack the nut of intellectual resistance to his policies. He spoke of Deborin’s group:²⁰

They occupy the dominant positions in philosophy, in natural science and in several fine questions of politics. You’ve got to be able to grasp this. On questions of natural science the Devil knows what they’re doing; they are writing about Weismannism, etc., etc. — and this is all presented as Marxism.

It’s necessary to scatter them and dig over all this dung which has accumulated in philosophy and natural science.

Stalin treated the philosophers in the party cell as troops to be deployed in a campaign against the enemy.

The motif was manifest: ‘What sort of Marxism is this which separates philosophy from politics, theory from practice?’²¹ Stalin was somewhat incoherent. Elsewhere in his commentary he accused Bukharin and Deborin of cloaking their politics in philosophical argumentation. But he was not worried by his contradictions. He wanted cultural life cleared of every trace of opposition to his policies. Narrowness, rigidity and ritualism were to be introduced. Lenin was to be raised as the unchallengeable totemic figure in the campaign. His Materialism and Empiriocriticism, that crude work on epistemology which Stalin had dismissed when it appeared in 1909, would be elevated to the status of a philosophical classic and all philosophers would have to take its postulates as axiomatic.²²

Yet even Stalin could not totally ignore the huge disruptions to agriculture caused by his policies. Forewarned of the fate awaiting them, peasant communities in Ukraine, the north Caucasus, south Russia and central Asia took up arms. The urban squads of collectivisers were met with violent opposition. The Red Army, despite early official concerns about the loyalty of its conscripts, successfully suppressed such risings; and nowhere did the rebels manage to organise themselves across a broad territory as they had at the end of the Civil War. But the imposition of collective farms led to deep resentment. Antagonism to the authorities was ineradicable and the millions of peasants who were forced to give up their property and customs withdrew co-operation. Productivity fell away. A system proposed as the permanent solution to the problems of the rural economic sector might have yielded more grain for the towns but this was happening at the point of a rifle, and the perils of continuing mass collectivisation at the current rate became obvious.²³

Several in Stalin’s entourage witnessed on the trips around the country the appalling consequences of this policy. (They did this without calling for a reversal of the general line: they were not Bukharinists.) Stalin was unbudgeable from the general line of agrarian policy. The most he would concede was that local implementation had been excessive and that officials in the provinces had misunderstood central policy. On 2 March 1930 Pravda printed an article by him, ‘Dizzy with Success’, which castigated over-zealous collectivisers:²⁴

It follows that the task of the party is to consolidate the achieved successes and to use them in a planned fashion for further movement forward.

But the successes have their dark side, especially when they are achieved ‘easily’ and, so to speak, through the mode of ‘unexpectedness’.

He deceitfully insisted that it had always been his intention that collectivisation should be conducted on the voluntary principle. By then the proportion of the USSR’s agricultural households herded into collective farms had risen to about 55 per cent.²⁵ Stalin maintained that local party officials were guilty of ‘excesses’ and ‘distortions’. Unlike the United Opposition, he declared the central party leadership had not intended to impose collectivisation by force and by decrees.

‘Dizzy with Success’ involved gargantuan hypocrisy. Although he was primarily culpable for the recent acceleration, Stalin did not admit blame. For a whole year he had goaded party officials to bully peasants into collective farms. He had issued fearsome directives on dekulakisation. He had sacked and disgraced politicians who criticised the pace of collectivisation; even his cronies in the Politburo had attracted his ire. But he had a highly developed instinct for political self-preservation. Embitterment against him was intense in society. The time had come to place the blame on those who had faithfully implemented his wishes. He got away with this. Confused lower-level officials allowed many millions of households to revert to traditional land tenure. Quickly the percentage of collective farms in the USSR’s agriculture started falling: by early June it was only twenty-three.²⁶ Yet Stalin, while willing to retreat tactically, was fixed on his strategy: Soviet farming was to be forced into the collectivist mould in short order. After the summer the campaign for total collectivisation was resumed and in 1932 about 62 per cent of the households engaged in agriculture belonged to collective farms. The percentage was to rise to ninety in 1936.²⁷ This was achieved by means of massively increased force applied with greater precision than before. The result was turmoil in the countryside. The combination of violent seizure of grain stocks and violent reorganisation of farm tenure and employment resulted in famine across vast areas.

The economic premise of policy was not publicly revealed, but Stalin made it plain in an instruction to Molotov: ‘Force up the export of grain to the maximum. This is the core of everything. If we export grain, credits will be forthcoming.’²⁸ A few days later, in August 1930, he repeated the message in case its content had not been fully accepted. Mikoyan had reported complacently about the level of wheat procurement across the USSR. This to Stalin was insufferable. The point was to go on raising that level and to ‘force up’ the grain export trade ‘wildly’.²⁹ Nothing less than a hysterical campaign to collect and sell wheat abroad would satisfy him.

Again and again he reverted to tactical, temporary retreats such as had happened with ‘Dizzy with Success’. On holiday by the Black Sea in August 1931 he saw enough for himself to know that collectivisation had reduced ‘a series of districts in west Georgia to starvation’. But characteristically he blamed the resident party and OGPU officials: ‘They don’t understand that the Ukrainian methods of grain procurement, necessary and sensible in grain districts, are imprudent and harmful in non-grain districts which, moreover, have no industrial proletariat.’ He even deplored the arrest of hundreds of people — not a reaction normally found in Stalin’s career.³⁰ Stalin recommended that grain be shipped forthwith into west Georgia. Contrary to what is often thought, the Politburo under his leadership frequently made such decisions on emergency relief. But always the main strategic objective was kept in mind and eventually reapplied.